Guest Editorial: Human–Computer Interaction: Real-Time Vision Aspects of Natural User Interfaces

Abstract

Computer vision for human–computer interaction has been in our living rooms for a few years now. We have witnessed an exponential growth in capability of vision systems for computer games, from Sony’s EyeToy for PlayStation 2 in 2003, Eye for PlayStation 3 in 2007, to Microsoft’s Kinect for XBOX 360 in 2010. In addition to enhancing our interaction with computer games, Kinect has had a deeper role in changing our expectations for human–machine interfaces of the future. We may need to wait a few more years to have computers like those in the science fiction movie Minority Report, but the games and hacks using Kinect show us that such interfaces are getting closer to reality. We now expect our TVs, smart phones, and tablets to have such capability and soon that will be a reality. To that end, the research in both academia and industry continues to make great strides, as demonstrated by the presentations at the Workshop on Human–Computer Interaction: Real-Time Vision Aspects of Natural User Interfaces, which the present guest editors organized at the 2011 ICCV in Barcelona. After the workshop was over, we had an open call for papers for authors to write journal articles on their work related to this topic, and the result of this effort is this Special Issue of the IJCV. The papers presented in this special issue